Performance in collaboration with Caroline Profanter, SEASONAL NEIGHBOURS, Wellen, Belgium, 2022

Seasonal Neighbours is a loose-fixed collective, focusing on different forms of seasonality and forms of cohabitation in Europe’s countryside. Through fieldwork, art and design interventions, critical conversations, thoughtful representations and written research, this subject is explored in a myriad of themes.

My own research is based on an attempt to take a closer look at the rhythms and cycles in the field, and the relationships between working bodies and crops. Their roles within the agricultural sector are interdependent and intertwined with each other. To consider both requires a different form of listening. Both the plants and the workers are disciplined and rhythmized within this industrial agricultural framework, but there are still important natural, biological processes which resist the compulsion of synchronisation.

Together with the composer Caroline Profanter, we speculated on these processes and biological (poly-)rhythms as resisting, arbitrary forces against the synchronisation and the silencing by monoculture.

During the group exhibition of SEASONAL NEIGHBOURS in Z33 in 2022 we showed the first stage of this research. The project was concluded with a concert in a strawberry greenhouse in Wellen on the farm of Hilke Neiss, with all the living beings in this habitat as the audience (including plants and insects, permanent and seasonal workers).

image: Roberto Priamo Sechi